A Rugged Land in a Flat World? The Localized Knowledge Spillovers in a Globalized Economy
[Yanfeng Zheng and Qinyu Wang] Abstract: Does globalization breed global knowledge spillovers? We first examine this question using 13 million patents and their citations across 25 patent offices with a rigorous matching method. The results show that cross-country knowledge spillovers have surprisingly declined during 1990-2010. We then develop hypotheses intrigued by this counterintuitive trend through a legal perspective.
